Corsair Neutron XTi 960GB SSD Including RAID-0 Review

Conclusion

When it comes to modern SSDs, it is hard to get the balance right between pricing, performance and capacity. Yes, you can now get 1TB M.2 NVMe SSDs, but these are often at a price level which is simply unfeasible for the majority of builds.

Even when not considering pricing, M.2 NVMe drives are currently not able to offer capacities of over 1TB, again making SATA drives like the Corsair Neutron XTi look a lot more attractive.  

Right now most consumers are best off getting SATA/AHCI SSDs over an NVMe, with SATA III offering compatibility with pretty much any modern system and coming in at a much more affordable pricepoint. While Corsair's Neutron XTi series are designed to offer premium SATA performance, in our testing it has more often than not topped our graphs, making this drive much faster than a lot of its peers.  

At £379.99 for the 960GB version, £167.99 for the 480GB version and around £760 for the 2TB version these drives are certainly not the cheapest SSDs on the market, though they do offer some of the best performance that is possible on SATA today. 

When looking at Corsair's specifications and our results we can see that Corsair's drives operate exactly as intended, offering chart-topping read speeds for SATA SSDs and a 5-year warranty to back that up. Corsair is confident that their Neutron XTi series of drives will both perform and stand the test of time, which is something that is great to see. 

Aesthetically the Corsair Neutron XTi series has a red enclosure which is covered by a large plain sticker, leaving all of the important details of the drive hidden on the rear and leaving only the drive's branding on display inside your case. This small touch will make this SSD look great in most systems, provided that you like the red colouring.  

When running two of these SSDs in RAID 0 we found that the performance of this drive scaled very well, offering nearly double the sequential read and write performance, often competing well with our selection of M.2/PCIe SSDs. 

While the Corsair Neutron XTi is on the more expensive side of the SATA SSD spectrum it offers unparalleled sequential read performance and they come in a range of capacity and price points to suit many budgets. All-in-all Corsair's Neutron XTi SSDs are certainly worth looking at if you desire premium grade SATA SSD performance, particularly if you are looking for large storage capacities coupled with fast performance to invigorate an aging laptop or have your games load that bit faster. 

When it came to choosing an award for the Neutron XTi it was a difficult task, as while this drive does offer top-tier performance in the SATA SSD category there will always be those who will argue that "it is just another SATA drive" and that "NVMe is the way forward" but it is still an SSD that can be called nothing short of "performance grade". Because of that we have decided to give the Corsair Neutron XTi the OC3D Performance award, as more often than not this SSD topped our graphs in the SATA category and offers capacities that NVMe SSDs cannot match right now without having to mortgage your kidney. 

You can join the discussion on Corsair's Neutron XTi 960GB SSDs on the OC3D Forums.